The facts which those documents represented, however, were not bogus; those who were in charge of the Guard unit at the time said as much during the investigation into Memo Gate.

I would also point out that the WHite House under Bush has hardly ever investigated its own errors and owned up to them. The nation swooned when Bush even acknowledged that no WMD had been found and that that intell had been false.


A little perspective here. (1) a professional and respected news anchor gets misled by false documents, and acts on it based on false representations. When the lie is discovered he apologizes publically for his wrong doing. Cost: public embarassment for his network, embarassment for the Administration, perhaps a couple of hundred thousand dollars wasted.

(2) A standing president gets false information about Iraq's weapons programs. At the same time he also gets the correct data from others. He acts on the negative data, changing the emphasis multiple times for the reason for doing so. After years of people pointing out the obvious error in his thinking, he finally acknowledges the data was wrong, but insists on the rightness of the decision anyway. Cost: between two and three thousand U.S. lives, thousands of scarred and wounded veterans, tens of thousands of lives lost among residents of Iraq, loss of repute internationally, billions of dollars wasted.


A